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Facebook’s Open Graph: Ready To Abuse

I’m virtually never critical of Facebook, but this new Washington Post Social Reader [see mashery], is really negatively affecting my day to day Bookface experience, and it’s lead me down a path to realize that Facebook might have a problem.

I believe in a few years, we won’t really be visiting websites as often as we do now, the web will be much more pub-sub, and that’s why everyone has shifted to “time spent” as their key metric. This new social integration– when users take an action, “Matt ‘read’ ‘some article’, is a blatant attempt by Facebook to collect data on literally everything you do. I think Facebook realized that they are way behind Google in this realm and made a very strategic move to get ahead– they get ahead by making the data simpler to parse for their developers and analytics team, all while relying on developers to do it for them! [It's genius.] They can easily seperate out verbs and subjects– I like to “run”, and I “listen” to “Pearl Jam”. It’s spectacular to watch a company like Facebook leverage open source developers in such an intelligent way to the benefit of their company profits. What’s even more amazing is that they basically have a stranglehold on developers! Social and friends are such an important integration into products these days that developers HAVE to use the OG!

That said, the Spotify integration is great. The fact that you can click pause and play within the web experience and have a desktop application instantly react to those clicks is very impressive. [As Simmons would say, GoodJobByYouSpotify!] People listen to music, but apparently not as often as they read articles. [You're right, it's because the spotify penetration isn't nearly as high as-- well-- anybody can read an article.] But if every one of my friends was listening to music on Spotify, I’d be complaining all the same.

The Washington Post Social Reader app is brutal. People read so many articles on the web, these links are all over my feed. Try clicking one, you get asked to auth the app everytime– which takes you to a (slow) facebook app auth page. Sure, I can say “no thanks”, but you’re still slowing my browsing speed by 4X. Think about it, now I have to wait for this tweener app auth page and hit back twice when I want to go back to facebook. Okay so you’re thinking, just auth the damn app and revoke it’s publishing privileges. Well number one I’m not auth-ing the app because I don’t want everyone to know how much I read about the Kardashian divorce [c'mon, I don't though], or how much I read up on whether or not this country is ready for a Mormon president. Secondly, I’m sure the developers are going to figure out that you don’t have all the privledges, and ask you to auth again.

I think Facebook took a dangerous step toward the MySpace “anything goes” model. I understand they did it to add value to their business, but at what cost? In the end, they can fix their experience because it’s their experience– but developers wouldn’t be getting what they were promised. I believe the Open Graph leaves Facebook’s real estate to be too easily abused. It’s going to be very interesting to watch how much if you care about your Facebook feed in a few months.

From the business side, keep in mind that this is a play by Facebook to get ahead of Google. Google has way more data on you– [there's a reason all my sponsored links are for new ski gear] think about it, they can see your purchase history (directly and indirectly) either with your google purchases, or just by scraping your e-mail. Upper hand still goes to Google. Data on what users buy is way more valuable than what users do– we’re all trying to make money here.

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